[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Adam Chlipala]

Daniel Margolis wrote:
> We should try to put a price tag on hardware support. It's easy to 
> figure out the monthly cost of a VPS, so once we decide how much we're 
> going to pay for staffing (if we're going to pay for staffing, which 
> it sounds like there's some consensus on), we can at least estimate 
> how much staff time would be spent on hardware support if we go that 
> route. It's a good comparison to make.

David Snider wrote:
> I'm not sure how to estimate the number of 'instance hours' we have on
> HCOOP. I'd be curious to know what the cost of running HCOOP would be if we
> were running a similar usage pattern on Amazon EC3.

I've been doing a lot of talking in this thread, so I just want to say 
explicitly that I don't know how to calculate either of these figures 
and have no particular plans to do so.  I'm going to go forward assuming 
that, with 100+ users, it's most cost-effective for us to have our own 
servers.  We may have been lucky so far hardware-failure-wise, but we've 
had truly negligible costs that I would file under "hardware support," 
and I think staff, physical space, and power completely dominate 
"hardware support" in realistic accounting.

It would be interesting to read someone else's credible attempt at those 
calculations, though.